Android editing features
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Android
more enjoyable Android editing experience for new contributors
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What is this project?
[edit]In the 2018-2019 annual plan, the Android team will be building several new features designed to attract and encourage new contributors in emerging and historically under-served communities. Throughout the year we’ll be working on a number of different features designed to create an easy and enjoyable editing experience that will keep those contributors coming back to the app.
Why new contributors?
[edit]If you already contribute to Wikimedia projects, don't worry - these features are for you too, and we think you'll enjoy them. But Android has loads of users in South/Southeast Asia, Africa, South America, and other places where the wiki communities are still quite small. We want to make it easy and enjoyable for those folks to contribute high-quality content from their phones - unlocking the breadth of knowledge and experience that people in those communities can share.
What specifically are you going to do?
[edit]Glad you asked! Here's a high-level overview of what we're doing each quarter. This is subject to change based on community feedback and the results of our user testing.
Q1 - July-September 2018
[edit]- User test redesigned app navigation, and release.
- Notifications prototype and A/B test. (For the welcome, milestone, and thanks notification types only.)
- Community engagement around editing features.
Q2 - October-December 2018
[edit]- Edit action feed (for captions, content translation microcontributions, extending title description editing) prototype and user testing. See initial ticket <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T197155>
Q3 - January-March 2019
[edit]- Release edit action feed.
- Build and user test native Talk page and/or Watchlist prototypes.
Q4 - April-June 2019
[edit]- Release native Talk page/Watchlist.
- Prototype additional editing feature TBD pending data/community engagement results.
How can I get involved?
[edit]If you have questions, comments, or suggestions, please post them on the Talk page. We're actively soliciting feedback about how we can make Wikipedia welcoming to new contributors who may only be able to access it through their mobile phones.
You can also sign up to be a User Tester. User testers get to try very early versions of features and provide extensive feedback on usability and other issues.
Updates
[edit]Updates will be in reverse chronological order - newest first. Questions? Comments? Get in touch.
06 February 2019
[edit]The team completed the prototype App Editor Tasks feature before the holiday break, and user testing began on time in the second week of January. We're about a week from wrapping up the initial phase of testing, and will be making changes and improvements to the features based on the feedback from our testers, who are a mix of new and experienced editors from countries on several continents. We're targeting a beta release by the end of March.
13 December 2018
[edit]The team is now hard at work on a beta version of our App Editor Tasks feature, working towards user testing that should begin in the second week of January with both experienced editors and new editors from emerging markets. If you're interested in taking part in the user research, get in touch!
23 October 2018
[edit]We have now released our redesigned app navigation that puts reading at the heart of the user experience, together with a V0 version of notifications. You can find the updated version on Google Play - let us know what you think!
17 September 2018
[edit]The team is currently working on productionising a redesigned app navigation that puts reading at the heart of the user experience. We hope to release in mid-October after our off-site meeting in sunny Atlanta. Our V0 beta test of notifications will be released near the end of this week. You can find the Wikipedia Beta app on Google Play - we'll announce when it's in the store.
27 August 2018
[edit]Our V0 beta test of notifications is code complete, and the test should begin within the next few weeks after analytics, QA and design review. We're currently hard at work on user testing of our redesigned navigation prototypes, and design explorations around the edit actions feed for Q2. We're also working on UX updates and bug fixes that should make the app easier and more pleasant to use, especially when you're offline.
17 August 2018
[edit]The Android team has been hard at work on developing a small-scale test of echo notifications in the app. For version 1, we will be testing the Welcome, Milestone, and Thanks notifications to see what effect they have on retaining contributors in the app. We want to spread the love by making sure everyone gets the recognition and thanks their efforts deserve! Later this fiscal year we will be implementing other types of notifications (edit reverts, talk page messages, etc) but for now we're focused on getting the small things right, and on moving the needle on our goal of getting more folks to enjoy (and to stay!) contributing to Wikipedia on Android. We'll post some images of the feature after our user testing is complete.
27 July 2018
[edit]We've been thinking about how to measure the positive effect our work is having on the editing community. See the new "measuring impact" section at the bottom for more information.
17 July 2018
[edit]We're testing a brand-new Wikitext keyboard at Wikimania this week. If you're at Wikimania, come over to our table and say hello! iOS and Web are also testing some exciting features.
Measuring Impact
[edit]How can we make sure that the features we're building are being enjoyed by wiki communities around the world? Equity is at the core of our work, so we want to make sure the mobile editing love is shared by all. To make sure, we started thinking about how to measure the success of our new mobile editing features.
We started by looking at "mobile-heavy" wikis: wikis with more than 10 active editors per month (so we have a basic level of editing activity) and where mobile unique devices account for more than 70% of the total. Then we looked at mobile-heavy wikis where more than 15% of the edits come from mobile devices, to make sure that the community on those wikis is interested in editing on mobile. We further narrowed this down to wikis where mobile app pageviews make up more than 1% of the total, so that we can make sure that we're reaching people in the community with what we're able to offer on the Android app itself. Lastly, we narrowed down the list to those wikis that had more than 15 new editors a month joining, so that we can make sure we're having a positive impact on new editors - which is our goal this year.
It was heartening to see that a wonderful mix of languages from all over the world emerged from this process. Here is where we'll measure our impact first:
| Bangla Wikipedia | Hindi Wikipedia | Arabic Wikipedia | Swedish Wikipedia |
| Persian Wikipedia | Marathi Wikipedia | Italian Wikipedia | |
| Portuguese Wikipedia | Finnish Wikipedia | Hebrew Wikipedia | |
| Chinese Wikipedia | Russian Wikipedia | Tamil Wikipedia |
We excluded English - not because we don't love it, but because the community is SO huge that we're not sure we could measure our impact with a high amount of fidelity. We also had to exclude Turkish Wikipedia from the list :(
Don't forget, though, that the Android editing features are for everyone, no matter which wiki you contribute to. We still want to hear your voice, and will be engaging with as many folks as we can over the coming year.